I got a notification on my watch and like any well-trained modern technology user, I checked it out, to find this:
Nice indeed! There are a few issues with this, though:
I do not own an elliptical
I was sitting in my chair at the computer doing pretty much the opposite of burning calories. How many calories are consumed by using your eyes to read text off a screen? I’m assuming not many.
This raises the question of how the Fitbit Inspire HR, which was in my pocket at the time, somehow decided I not only did an impossible workout, but did it for 19 minutes. Normally there would be some semi-plausible explanation, like I was moving back and forth from one room to another, and it was misinterpreting that as exercise, but no, I was sitting still in a chair.
Now, I have tricked my Apple watch into thinking I did a few minutes of exercise by vigorously singing along to music with the headphones on, but that’s one of those semi-plausible things. With the Fitbit the only way I could have been less active is if I was sleeping.
It is a mystery, then, and a reminder that while technology can be great, it can also fall flat on its shiny metal face.
The Fitbit One is a step tracker that, unlike most, does not strap onto your wrist. It comes with a clip but I always kept it in the watch pocket of my jeans where it tracked faithfully.
I am using the past tense because my Fitbit One is now dead, murdered by washing. To be more precise, when I did my last load of laundry this past Friday I forgot to take the Fitbit out of that watch pocket and realized this with five minutes left in the wash cycle. It came out dead and remains dead. It is tracking in technology Heaven now.
I’ve actually done this once before and the Fitbit One not only survived, it gave me a bonus 1400 steps from tumbling around inside the washer for 45 minutes. The difference this time is the button on it had collapsed into the unit and while it still worked fine after the button collapse, tracking just as it always has, I suspect that this created a gap for water to get in and zap everything to heck and back.
I looked into replacing my deceased device, but apparently Fitbit quietly stopped making the One awhile back. Local stores don’t stock it. The closest replacement is the Fitbit Zip, which only tracks steps and is shaped a bit like a watch, sans strap. But I have my Apple watch now for tracking and it’s on my wrist where it more easily guilts me into meeting my goals (see here for more), so I think I’ll just stick to the one device.
I feel a bit silly killing the Fitbit One like this, but I appreciate the slight de-cluttering of the technology in my life.
Things I have done to complete all three activity rings on my Apple Watch:
paced quickly back and forth in the living room
gone for a spontaneous six block walk
walk to the grocery store to buy several non-essential items
jumping jacks without the jumping
running on the spot (this can actually get your heart rate up pretty quickly, just like running where you actually move forward)
hung my arm down at my side (to get a Stand goal during a meeting. It’s a cheat but it totally works and beats suddenly standing up in a meeting and staying like that for a minute while everyone stares at you)
gotten up to use the washroom (also for the Stand goal; this is one of those win-win situations, killing two birds and all that)
reduced the Move goal for the day (when I’ve been sick. Since getting the watch this has worked every time I’ve fallen ill except one day when I was too weak and just laid like a lump and broke my streak)
The reason I’ve done all the above is to maintain a streak, because streaks create a positive feedback loop and you don’t want to break them. Breaking them is where the donut-eating starts. And Apple doesn’t allow for mulligans, so you can’t take a day off due to illness/accident/utter laziness.
It’s worked pretty well so far. I did four of these just today (I am unwell). I prefer hitting the goals all legit-like, though, because it means I’m healthy and stuff.
I exercised for over three hours yesterday, which is a lot for me. First there was the usual weekend stuff:
10K run at Burnaby Lake
8K walk to and from above-mentioned lake
About an hour and a half later Jeff and I went for a bike ride at Colony Farm that inadvertently included a decent amount of uphill cycling (Colony Farm itself is entirely flat). This worked out thusly:
13K cycling, average speed 12 km/h
All told, I burnt oodles of calories and was confident that I would sleep soundly that night. Indeed, by about 9 p.m. I could barely stay awake sitting in ye olde computer chair and so I went to bed early.
And spent the first half of the night having a weird un-sleep where I kept waking up, felt weird and bad, would get up to pee and would feel even more weird and bad, with almost flu-like symptoms. By early morning it all seemed to settle down and a Tums plucked from the bathroom cabinet went unconsumed by the bedside.
Still, it was a strange experience. I fully expected to conk out almost immediately after all the exercise but the opposite happened.
Also, my butt is slightly sore today and I wore my special biking undies, too. Also also I kept getting the high and low gears mixed up because it’s been that long since the last bike ride. I managed to get them right for our one big unplanned ascent, though. I still hget nervous bombing downhill. I do not have a need for speed.
Today, after all that exercise yesterday, I suggested we go to the Canada Games Pool. So we did–and I spent half an hour on the elliptical. And then I forgot to turn off the activity on my watch, so it thinks I was on the elliptical for an hour. Haha, no. I haven’t gone quite that mad yet.
The bonus activity-recording did capture half an hour of intense ping pong after the elliptical, though. Jeff won 2-1 and all the games were close. At one point the ping pong ball ended up in my shorts. I had no idea this was even possible and mused over the seeming impossibility of it while I fished the ball out of my shorts. I had to do this because it actually got lodged in the mesh fabric of the shorts.
We finished up at the whirlpool, which actually felt kind of nice after all the pseudo-running and not pseudo ping-ponging. I still get nervous about dunking the watch but it always comes out fine. Just before leaving the whirlpool, an old guy showed up wearing massive earphones. He also had a tablet (possibly a Surface) that was playing videos or something. He set it by the edge of the whirlpool so he could rock out while he soaked. I’m not sure I’d risk that much technology so close to a swimming pool, a whirlpool and a lot of wandering and very wet people. But who am I to judge?
I hope I sleep better tonight. I’m not going to bed early.
Also, here’s an official stock image of the Canada Games Pool showing the upper fitness area where I do elliptical training and then forget to stop tracking the activity on my watch:
Last night I defied my own expectations by exercising on a Monday night. Monday night is usually when the couch has an unnatural magnetic attraction but I had a strange urge to get out and burn a few calories, so off we went to the Canada Games Pool.
My second run (so to speak) on the elliptical went well. I couldn’t remember the settings I’d used previously for height/resistance so I just made my best guess and went with 12/7. It proved to be harder so my guessing sucks.
On the plus side, I remembered to start the workout on my watch but since I ended it on time instead of letting it go for an extra five minutes as I did the first time, my calorie count was lower.
On the machine itself, my calorie count went up significantly, though, from 260 the first time to 339 last night. Also, my legs felt wobbly when I got off the elliptical and walked down the stairs to the main level of the pool. No stiffness or soreness today, though, so hooray on that.
I think for the next trip I will try the dreaded treadmill (I have no idea why–except perhaps madness–treadmills are always much busier than the ellipticals). I may then alternate between the two as each works different muscles. All part of my clever plan to become a big muscular something or other.
And so it was that my 242 day move streak–as recorded by the Activity app on my Apple Watch–ended, thanks to my desire to rest and recover from a nasty cold. Apple doesn’t have a mulligan option in their activity app, so you’re either hardcore or a complete loser. I am now a loser again, with my current move streak at 0 days.
Alas.
On the other hand, the end of the streak freed me up from having to worry about it, allowing me to rest again today. In fact, I didn’t even go outside! This could be a bad thing if I was feeling healthier, as the ease with which a streak can be broken does not help in egging people on to keep streaks alive. A conundrum, for sure, and one that Zac Hall discussed recently on 9to5Mac–Feature Request: Apple Watch Activity rest days, tolerance levels, and an honor system.
In the meantime, I’m still congested but feeling a bit perkier. I’ll go outside tomorrow, even as the remnants of a typhoon continue to knock down trees all over the Lower Mainland. I probably won’t run again until Tuesday, though, and by then it will be dark before I’m even done, so maybe I won’t run on Tuesday after all.
In fact, maybe I’ll just buy some short bread, sit around and gain back that 20 pounds I lost over the last year, all thanks to Apple’s refusal to accommodate off-days in their Activity app. Thanks for making me fat again, Apple! Also, no one charges $1549 for a laptop with a Core m3 processor in it except you. Sorry, that one just kind of slipped out.
Two and a half years ago I got a Fitbit One. It’s one of only two trackers Fitbit makes that doesn’t strap to your wrist. I keep mine in the watch pocket of my jeans (or just in the regular pocket of my shorts when the summer weather is actually summer-like). This had the effect of making me treat its goals casually. If I made the 10,000 step daily goal it was nice but I never felt inclined to push toward it.
About eight months ago I picked up an Apple Watch. It has an activity app that tracks three things: Move, Exercise and Standing. The stand goal is pretty simple, as the Apple site states: “The Stand ring closes when you’re up for at least one minute in 12 different hours during a day.” This is pretty easy to achieve unless you spend 15 hours of the day sleeping. Move tracks active calories, so simply walking will contribute to this, albeit not super quickly. Exercise is defined as activity that is at least at a pace of brisk walking. This is set to 30 minutes by default and is usually the first goal I hit each day because the 30 minutes don’t have to be consecutive and I pretty much walk briskly all the time, varying only in the degree of briskness.
Now that I’ve explained what the Apple Watch activity app does, I’ll explain the crucial feature that separates it from my Fitbit One: the watch is on my wrist and the activity ring is on the watch face I’ve selected, meaning I can at a glance always see how close I am to the three goals. I see the incomplete rings and they bug me, just as they’re supposed to. The visibility makes all the difference. The activity app will also occasionally make the watch chirp or tap my wrist to remind me to stand or egg me on for one of the other goals. And I obey.
Take today, for example. I normally do about a 5 km walk each day and that, combined with other moving about and generally existing, is usually enough to get me the exercise and move goals. Today, with the full effect of vacation settling in and no run scheduled, I was feeling lazy. I did some walking for about 20 minutes but that’s not enough to fill those rings. I lazed away most of the afternoon. I had dinner. I looked at the time. I looked at those incomplete rings. I got up and went for a brisk walk. I kept walking until my watch happily dinged, confirming I’d reached my move goal. Then I walked a little more before coming home just because.
I also stopped and scratched the ears of a tabby cat that lives a few blocks from my place on the way back. Bonus calories burned, rewarded with purring.
Another insidious feature of the activity app is it tracks consecutive days and rewards you for streaks. My move streak is currently 176 days. As it grows longer I get more anxious about breaking it so I keep walking, I keep moving.
One night I went out in a rainstorm at 10:30 p.m. and circled a four block area twice to reach my move goal. I did this after calculating that walking briskly in the restricted confines of the condo wouldn’t get me to the goal before midnight, thus leading to the horror of the move streak ending. Unacceptable.
And here’s the thing: I am a self-admitted slave to this technology. It works exactly as it is designed to, providing just the right level of incentive to keep me going. But it’s good because it keeps me moving, prevents me from calcifying in a chair for hours at a time and is keeping me generally aware of the importance of remaining active and specifically bugging me when I’m not. I’ve even started adjusting the move goal higher, forcing me to do more to hit it.
Now, if all of this turns out to be a sneaky way to get humanity to lay down the groundwork for SkyNET or the Matrix or something, I’ll be miffed. But I’ll be miffed and in shape.
Now that February has arrived, the first real deep freeze has come along with it. Four years ago they had to truck in snow for the Winter Olympics, so this is about right, weather-wise. Our weather has a well-developed sense of irony.
Instead of running today I opted to do a walk as a warm-up to a run tomorrow. I walked from home to Burnaby Lake, around the lake, then up to the Production Way SkyTrain station, a total of around 16 km or a bit more. My time was two hours and twenty five minutes, which is my usual exercise walking pace. When you maintain it for 2+ hours it really starts to feel like exercise, too.
I have a big ol’ blister on the lower inner part of my right foot now, just like when I did the same walk a month ago and it tasks me now much as it did back then. I could feel it forming while I walked but what can you do? Curiously I did not get the mirror blister on the left foot like last time, which leads me to the scientific conclusion that my right foot is weird.
As is usually the case when exercising, I expect my weight to be up tomorrow but I can rest easy knowing it is not because of the evil that donuts do.
Don’t worry, I still have my calves. They’re right where they should be–above my ankles and below my knees. I am remembering them in particular due to my first trip to the gym last Wednesday. My partner and I headed over to the Canada Games Pool here in New Westminster to do a basic cardio workout that would not stress my Achilles tendon but would help get my flabby self back in shape before I resume my runs.
The pool has a full-featured gym so I paid $48 for a 10-pack of visits and in return got a shiny ID card with requisite horrible photo that could be scanned upon entry. I did my first scan and was set.
The gym area was surprisingly busy but we managed to find a pair of free ellipticals next to each other. Jeff also found a nice young instructor named Ryan who went over the basics of using the machine, as I had never been on one before. It seemed pretty straightforward. I got on, started the timer and began a 25 minute workout. I raised the tension up a bit to 3 (from 1) and reduced the incline down to 3 (from some value I can’t recall). This was done to better simulate a cross-country run instead of a jog up the side of a cliff. Within five minutes my calves were aflame. This is why you exercise regularly, to avoid your muscles crying out in horror at what you are doing to them. Fortunately they warmed up quickly and were fine the next day. I experienced a bit of minor soreness in my upper leg muscles but that was all. Given that my last run was in mid-November I consider this a rousing success.
I opted for only 20 minutes of workout instead of the full 25, not wanting to max it out the first night. I burned 173 calories–enough to take care of the ice cream I’d had for dessert earlier. I burned a few more when Jeff and I played a few rounds of ping pong, shot some hoops and then sweated in the whirlpool. In all it was actually kind of fun and I’m looking forward to our next trip. I may bring my iPod along for the elliptical part, though. It will distract me from constantly looking at the timer counting down, the analogy for which is indeed a watched pot that never boils.
